Roger Ray, pastor
Feb. 3, 2013 Epiphany 5
Luke 4:21-30
21Then he began to say to them, 'Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.' 22All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, 'Is not this Joseph's son?' 23He said to them, 'Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, "Doctor, cure yourself!" And you will say, "Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum." ' 24And he said, 'Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's home town. 25But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; 26yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. 27There were also many lepers* in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.' 28When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. 30But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Howard Zinn died three years ago this week. When he died at the age of 87, the press reported his death, describing him as a "leftist historian." I find it strange that he was labeled that way. There may be left and right perspectives but there are not left and right truths. Howard Zinn told us the truth about historical events which we very often did not previously know.
Things which it seems more politic not to mention..... like the fact that churches all over the nation found the miraculous story of Helen Keller to be nearly addictive until the blind and deaf young woman learned how to read Braille and when she had discovered how much violence, oppression and poverty there is in the world, Helen Keller became an outspoken advocate for a socialist reform movement in America..... that's when American churches began to say, "Well, you really can't pay much attention to a bind and deaf woman now can you?"
That's not a leftist fact. That's a fact. You can like Helen Keller or you cannot like Helen Keller but the fact is that once Helen Keller learned to read and write, she became an outspoken socialist..... it is a truth you have to deal with.
Zinn's recounting of history states certain uncomfortable facts, such as his almost throw away mention of Dr Charles Drew who developed the Red Cross' blood bank system,... Drew suggested that it was not medically necessary to separate the blood donations of white people and black people. Drew was then fired by the Red Cross, not because he actually mixed Negro and Caucasian blood but just because he suggested that it could be done.
Drew, for whom Drew Medical School is named, happened to be black himself, which made his suggestion that the blood of blacks and the blood of whites were the same all the harder for the white majority to take but it was true. But there are not black people truths and white people truths..... there's just the truth.
Zinn made a profession out of telling the unvarnished truth, and as a result, he was denied tenure and fired and marginalized and labeled and largely ignored in academic circles. John quotes Jesus as saying that you will know the truth and the truth will set you free but popular wisdom says that before the truth will set you free that it will make you very very angry.
We have a rather "on again, off again" relationship with the truth.... both as Christians and as Americans. There are things church people don't want to own up to.... and there are lots of things Americans don't want to own. There are things we would rather not know, or at least, we would rather not have said in public.
Many of us have objected to the fact that there were never casualty records kept of either Iraqi or Afghani deaths in wars in the Middle East. We count the deaths of American soldiers but reliable information about contract labor or enemy or civilian casualties has been difficult to find.
We have an unconscious belief that if we do not know the facts that the facts are not real..... it isn't really true until we acknowledge that it is true.
I was reading an article in the Christian Century years ago during the first Gulf War and I came upon a quote which was so bazaar that I copied it into a notebook and have held onto it through the years. The columnist wrote: Defending U.S. military censor's refusal to release video footage showing Iraqi soldiers being cut in half by cannon fire from helicopters, a Pentagon senior official said, "If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war."
......If we let people see that kind of thing....... There would never again be any war...... you see, there are truths, which if you utter them, you can lose your job, lose your credibility, lose you tenure..... you can make people very angry.
In the current gun control debate, you can be cast as a liberal for just stating numerical facts..... a 100,000 Americans get shot every year. 30,000 Americans die from gunshot wounds every year. That's not liberal.... that's not conservative.... that's math but you can get labeled as a liberal for just reciting those numbers because the people who don't want to deal with that fact don't want you to say those facts.
Luke tells us a very brief, encapsulated version of a time that Jesus went back to his home town to preach after he had become something of a superstar in the Galilee. The scene moves very quickly from everyone being so impressed with him that they were breathlessly praising him to this scene we see today where they entire congregation of the synagogue is pushing him towards a cliff with the intent of murdering their cousin, their former neighbor and friend.
What set them off? Well, he had been talking to them about liberation, about healing, about preaching good news to the poor.
Still, in a way, it was sort of a "chicken in every pot" kind of a political speech until he began to clarify himself and say, actually, the chicken won't be in your pot, it will be in the pot of your neighbor..... your neighbor who is not a member of this congregation, who is of another religion, a different race and who speaks a different language.
Preachers have, for centuries, secured their salaries and their pensions by telling straight people that gays are bad, by telling married people that divorced people are bad, and telling Christians that Moslems and Jews are bad, and telling Americans that the Germans, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, the Russians and the Iraqis are bad.
Religion often takes on a corporate view of the truth, like Wal-Mart did when Sheryl Crow released her self title CD several years ago which featured her song, "Love is a Good Thing." One of the lyrics in the song says, "Watch out sister, watch out brother, watch our children as they kill each other with a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores."
Wal-Mart executives met down in Bentonville to discuss the fact that Sheryl Crow was calling them out on the fact that they do, in fact, sell guns right next to the toy department in over 2000 stores nationwide. And faced with that fact they had to make a decision to do something about it, and this is what they decided: They voted to ban all sales of Sheryl Crow's cd in their stores. Keep selling the guns, but don't sell Sheryl Crow's cd because it is dangerous..... to sales of guns.
The Danish philosophy, Soren Kierkegaard, was very critical of the irrelevance of the church of his day. He once quipped: .. for our generation does not stop with faith, does not stop; with the miracle of faith, turning water into wine - it goes further and turns wine into water. Isn't that what church has felt like to so many of us so often? By treating us like we were children..... by filling our heads with stories of magic and superstition and by masking the real truth of our existence.... they had taken the potent wine of the message of Jesus and turned it into filtered water.
As we are gathered here in our church this morning, for the first time in our history, our elementary aged children are in a class of their own in our newly opened Annex. There was a time in our history that we thought we might be just something of a boutique church..... a church for people who had become disenfranchised with mainstream theology.... a church for people who hungered for intellectual honesty and an academic approach to religion.
We are not a part of a denomination. There are not many other churches like ours anywhere that we know of but we have sought one another out because we know that we just don't fit in with the rest of the religious world that prefers not knowing the facts, that would rather wallow in superstition, lies and half truths than to actually do the hard work of changing the world.
Some time back we realized that it was not enough for us to just find some friends who also don't fit in. We realized that it was important to make sure that our children don't fit in either.
In part, we want to protect our children from being exposed to the dishonest mythology of either magical Christianity or American exceptionalism but the bigger issue, at least for me, is that the next generation will need its own prophets.
Howard Zinn is dead. Marcus Borg, John Spong, John Dominic Crossan and Karen Armstrong are reaching retirement age. Roger Ray and David Trobisch are not far behind. It is our task to teach our children to love the truth as much as we do not to perpetuate our church because we have no reason to believe that our children will stay in Springfield.
We want to prepare them, not to be members of this church but to be the church of the next generation.... to be the Howard Zinn's and John Spong's of the 21st century. Honestly, I wish that I was 36 years old and not 56 years old..... I wish that I could believe that I had another forty years to preach to nurture the progressive Christian movement, but a hundred yards to east of us, there is a room full of young prophets if only we will do our part to make sure that they can tell the truth from a lie and magic from reality. Let's make sure that we don't fail them.
Between now and the time that I have to retire, I'm going to try to live my life in a way that gives them something to live up to and to surpass if they can.
